BOOKS OF THE TIMES

BOOKS OF THE TIMES; Beware the First Sip Of Ol' Demon Coffee

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

Published: April 20, 1995

"Call me Oscar Progresso" is the first line in Mark Helprin's rapturous and melancholy new novel, which, like "A Soldier of the Great War," Mr. Helprin's last book, is a husky narrative of a singularly adventurous life. The author, of course, is taking an affectionate poke at Melville, letting the reader know from the beginning that "Memoir From Antproof Case" is going to be a variation on what the author of "Moby Dick" might have called a mighty book. His second sentence is: "Or, for that matter, call me anything you want, as Oscar Progresso is not my name." Mr. Helprin's work is in the tradition of grand, cerebral, picaresque storytelling, but with a modernist edge of self-parody.

"Memoir From Antproof Case" is like a giant freighter loaded with grain, taking on moisture and threatening to burst at the seams. Near the end, Oscar Progresso (or whatever his name is) discovers that his manuscript, which he writes on a cliff overlooking the sea, has picked up so much bulk during the voyage he has made through his life that it no longer fits into the case he is using to preserve it from the fauna of Brazil, where he has lived for many years as a kind of refugee from his earlier life.

Mr. Helprin, in short, leaves very little out, and that could be a fatal flaw in a novelist less stylishly imaginative. But "Memoir" is so full of exuberant unexpectedness that its narrative power never flags. It is a funny, extravagant, prodigal piece of writing, its occasional drift toward excess always arrested by Mr. Helprin's engaging mixture of the Melvillian (or perhaps the Conradian) and camp: "My limbs ached like a kingdom that has lost a war, and my stomach swelled with the nausea of all the seas, but my head, well, it hurt. It really hurt."

Like "A Soldier in the Great War," Mr. Helprin's new book hangs on a powerfully eccentric figure who is telling a life story, as full of events as a Homeric epic, to a youth, someone who, in contrast to the aging, indeed, dying narrator, is just starting out. The main figure of "Soldier," the splendid Alessandro Giuliani, is an Italian whose life is wholly and brilliantly imagined by Mr. Helprin, and whose experience is grounded in World War I. His counterpart in "Memoir" is an American seemingly closer to Mr. Helprin himself -- like the author, he grew up along the Hudson River north of New York City -- but whose story is more fanciful.

He is a powerful figure, this narrator, a victim of horrific events, a survivor, a man of brilliant opinions and somewhat, though not exactly, like Melville's Ishmael, in the grip of an obsession. In "Moby-Dick," it was the White Whale; in "Memoir," it is what the narrator sees as the Mephistophelian evil of coffee, "a filthy corruption brewed from a bean that poisons its own tree," a substance that "turns your inner self into a happy sparkling clockwork, hypnotizes you with artificial joy, and takes from you the sadness and deliberation that are the anchors of love." (Mr. Helprin is reported not to drink caffeinated beverages.)

The narrator, in other words, is a bit of a nut. He is driven by some great torment the nature of which we learn only at the end. He is also remarkably intelligent, full of wizardry and such a powerful capacity for shrewdness, self-deprecation and plain moral decency that he is sympathetic even when he is made annoyingly blind by his single, secret rage. He has been a fighter pilot (one of Mr. Helprin's talents is his depiction of technical worlds) and a risk analyst for an investment bank. He has killed men, one of them because of an incident involving coffee. He has been married to the richest woman in the world, and has spent years in an insane asylum in the mountains of Switzerland. And he lives like an escaped convict, a man on the lam, always watchful for assassins, overlooking the sea in an alien country, exiled for life.

Most of all -- and again like Alessandro in "A Soldier of the Great War" -- he is consumed by an unending, anguished yearning for love. In fact, his memoir is both a confession and an act of love, written to the young son of his wife. "Whatever I do I've always done not because I want something but to compensate for a loss," he tells the boy, "to bring about a balance, to create amends, to make things right."

That explanation is important, because at the center of "Memoir" is a marvelous act of nearly cosmic vengeance, a crime morally justified in the eyes of the narrator because the victims of it are felons themselves. It would be unfair to reveal its exact nature here, but it involves compelling and realistic technical detail and the emergence on the scene of a terrific supporting player. Call him Smedjebakken. He is a genius, "a man of an era that has passed, and as with everyone in that position, his ill-fittedness sometimes became illumination."

There are many moments that some might flatteringly call magical realism but that are really just implausibilities, not the larger implausibility of the entire life told in our narrator's memoir, but details inconsistent with the novel's own logic. Here and there Mr. Helprin sets himself a problem -- surreptitiously obtaining keys to a locked and guarded vault is one example -- for which he is unable to supply a plausible solution. And there are several instances of a kind of vaudeville, verbal misunderstandings that are funny in themselves but that appear, in the Tiffany-like context of this book, like bits and pieces of costume jewelry.

But these are minor flaws in an otherwise prize performance. Mr. Helprin is reported to have signed a five-book contract with his publisher, of which "Memoir" is the first result. One looks forward eagerly to the next.